http://community.pennwelldentalgroup.com/video/stemsave-informational-video
There’s also now a service that collects your stem cells from menstrual blood too. Well, if you’re female anyway.
I just can’t decide what I think about all these stem cell collection services. They all smell suspiciously of opportunistic money-making schemes, hurriedly leaping on the latest bandwagon. But of course, the thing they are relying on, is the fear that if you don’t do it now, your opportunity will be lost! The baby teeth one JMJ linked is like a second chance, and the menstrual blood one is like the backup plan, but I got the impression that the types of stem cells harvested are not as “good” as the cord blood ones.
Yeah, we considered doing the cord blood thing with our daughter, but it’s pretty expensive to store, and seems to be of limited utility.
Cord blood has been proven useful though, I’m not so sure about baby teeth.
When they discover that we can replicate stem cells and inject them into you and that the effect is eternal youth you’ll feel silly for not paying for this service.
At least that’s what they hope you think.
Plus there’s the whole unknown cost of storing the blood in the future. What’s stopping the company suddenly hiking up the yearly fee, since you are essentially locked in to their storage facility. I still worry that I should have done it first time/should do it this time.
I am absolutely glad that research is going in areas besides embryonic stem cells, though. If the fundies end up getting some shitty hardcore legislation passed against them (which would suck), well at least there are some other avenues being explored, even if those avenues are less promising.
For some reason while I read this I was imagining people crashing baby teeth into a powder to be used herbal medicine style. And then I started picturing Jojo’s post about menstrual blood and my imagination died.
Jojo, why did you have to drop that menstrual blood bomb on my imaginationland?
Instead of banking our daughter’s cord blood, we donated it. I wonder if they’ll ever tell us if it helped someone.
Why didn’t you donate some and bank some for yourselves? My youngest was born in 1998, so I didn’t have the option (or at least I didn’t know it if I did). Is the amount of blood so small it is an either/or decision?
I’m interested to hear which bank Angie used, but my understanding is that at least one of the banks has an arrangement whereby they will give it back to you if you ever actually need it, assuming they haven’t already used it on someone else. Also, private cord banks are expensive.
I’m starting to come to the same conclusion, that perhaps donation is the best way to go> That would give me vague peace of mind of knowing that we could probably get it if we needed.
We’re definitely donating. Even if we weren’t poor, I doubt we’d use a private bank anyway. It just seems expensively selfish.
The cost of private banking is very high and I have no idea if you can split the blood between two banks. Our cord blood went to a public bank, I’d have to dig out paperwork to see which one. It’s not something I worry about, honestly.
I asked about five staff members in the hospital whether I could donate Liam’s chord blood for medical research, three of them looked at me funny and two disappeared and gave me a pamphlet about stem cell storage companies.
It made me a little bit angry, then a little bit sad.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there are a lot of cord blood banks yet, and only two of them support non-local (i.e. mail-in) donations.
It seems a pity to waste something that could potentially be so valuable.
I’ll make it up by donating my body to medical science one day so all the med students can have a laugh prodding my wobbly bits.
Sorry to ask such a noobie question… How do you donate cord blood?
You have to choose one of the cord banking/donation services and then enroll with them. Also discuss it with your OB/midwife beforehand. They basically put your placenta and cord in a baggie and rush it to their on-site bank, or a courier picks it up and rushes it to a nearby bank.
I think your best bet is to ask at the hospital where you plan on giving birth. Unfortunately, Google isn’t producing any banks in Santa Cruz, but hopefully your hospital can point you to a local bank. Otherwise, www.cryo-intl.com and www.lifebankusa.com appear to be the only two banks that accept mail-in donations. And I haven’t the slightest clue what that entails.
I have no actual info to base this on, but I have to believe that if the day ever comes that medical science can do really useful stuff with your banked stem cells, you won’t need YOUR stem cells.
It just makes sense to me that with that kind of advance in medicine, any stem cells will work. And if stem cells get that useful in a real world day to day way, even the ‘fundies’ won’t be able to stop their use(even if they wanted to, which by that point they might not).
I went to my dentist today, who happens to be a totally awesome geek dentist. I also know he is into nanotechnology and used to be an engineer before becoming a dentist. So I figure he is a good skeptic type. I asked him about the stem cells from baby teeth thing, and he actually went to a conference/presentation on it. He seems to be of the opinion that it’s a waste of money, because by the time we have actually developed a bunch of uses for the stem cells, we will have some way of harvesting fresh stem cells from the body.